Dell PowerEdge VRTX

Description

The PowerEdge VRTX is a shared infrastructure platform offering extensive performance and capacity with office-level acoustics in a single, compact tower chassis. It is an ideal solution for small and midsize businesses as well as remote and branch offices of large enterprises. Employing the latest PowerEdge technology and high-availability features, VRTX can help you gain fast application response times, run multiple applications that need performance or low latency, power through peak processing periods and scale for future business growth. Find Out More All four server nodes have access to the low-latency internal shared storage that is ideal for virtualization and clustering. Local storage is also available in the chassis, which is highly economical and easier to manage than traditional SAN.

Excellent system with no issues to report so far. We have been using it for just past 2 years now.

What are the pros?

Not missed a beat since we had it installed other that a single disk failure which it handled the replacement of with a hot spare without issue.
It performs regular weekend checks on all disks and sends detailed email reports.

What are the cons?

Purchased this in 2014. There were lots of bugs and it always seemed that it was a CMC firmware update that fixed the issue. The midplane gave out very fast which disconnected our shared storage. All that considered I am happy with it but had to go through some growing pains before it was trusted enough to run mission critical application.

We have owned this VRTX ever since I started here Dec 2013. I have been heavily involved in maintaining, configuring and setting up this System. Our most recent upgrade was upgrading to a 10 GB Network switch. Updating our firmware is key to maintaining this system well. We originally deployed Windows 2012 Server on three of the 4 blades and at the beginning of this year purchased the final blade adding it to our Cluster. Microsoft's Fail Over Management makes managing these Hyper-V blades quite simple, but the core console web GUI is easy to understand and pick up on as well. I have to say I'm happy with the decisions to use this in our environment for the ease and movement of multiple servers as well as all the redundant aspects of clustering and storage. There have been a few issues with RAM and other Hardware issues but mostly a firmware update resolved these issues. My advice is to be sure to configure the logs and notifications to keep up to date on issues prior to using this in production. We had a few hard drives go bad but were replaced under warranty and one Memory Module. I have to say Dell's Customer service is top notch and has been a pleasure to work with.